I’m not singling you out personally. I just want to address this alongside some other comments that are similar on here to this.
This is not a gaming device. I understand because of its physical nature, that it’s often compared to what’s been on the market, which are VR headsets in the form of a game console, but this is not that.
The best way to really explain it is to use the terminology, which is blending digital content into your physical space, or spatial computing. It supports immersive experiences (most akin to VR, but nothing like what VR has traditionally offered), but that is optional. This is a product built to be in your world, and keep you in your world (augmented reality or AR). This is not something that you go into to escape life; on the contrary, it is designed to enhance it.
Facebook’s Oculus Quest is most often compared to this, again, for the reason I stated at the beginning. But these two products could not be more different. It’s like comparing an Xbox to a PC desktop — they’re used for different purposes. Just because Facebook is trying to brand itself as visionary by bolting on a feature or two from Apple’s product doesn’t make their product a spatial computer.
There have been two major interfaces in the market, the text-driven UI and the graphics UI. The text-driven UI is what started the entire personal computing revolution, with the Apple 2, with a personal computer on the desk of many who had not even heard of a computer. Then came the GUI to mass market in 1984 with Mac, but since then all existing products have been various forms of a GUI, all different but fundamentally the same. The question has arisen, what will come next after the GUI? After all, whether mouse, click wheel, or multi touch, they are all fundamentally GUI driven. This is where that product comes into play. It is the Mac of the GUI driven era. This is not the iPhone, which can be considered an extreme and advanced forward-thinking refinement of the GUI. This is the beginning of a new UI paradigm.
When the Mac came out, as ridiculous as it sounds to me, I’m sure there were naysayers about GUI: this is a toy, you can’t do stuff as fast as command line commands, it’s not as advanced, etc. But what the GUI did bring was an entirely new way to do computing, something that has revolutionized and created entire industries. Think about everything around you, everything is driven by a GUI now. There is very little that is not touched by this concept. And entire industries, like on demand accommodation or travel in an instant, where you can schedule a taxi, plane, and hotel room from YOUR room with all the pictures and videos of where you wish to go, in an instant. These sort of experiences would never be possible on a text-driven UI, like the Apple 2. You could never see, hear, or touch (with Multi touch) your photos and videos and bring them anywhere with you. You couldn’t video call your family, friends, and anyone. Obviously only a few examples, but nonetheless you get the point: GUI has revolutionized the entire world.
But at the beginning it wasn’t really that way (not that I was alive, but that’s the great thing about Internet: you get to become knowledgeable on things you weren’t alive for). The Mac launched not with millions of apps that knew what a GUI was truly for, but a pallet of apps designed by Apple that gave functionality, but also demonstrated what you can do with GUI. For the first time you could draw or see beautiful fonts like in a book.
But the thing is, much like certain critiques today, the app landscape was built for Text UI, where all that was dreamed possible and became useful on a PC was defined by what you could do with command line prompts and a text box, with lines, letters, and numbers. Technically speaking, the Mac was a new thing that really speaking, all the apps on an Apple 2 could do better there than on a Mac. If your app is a spreadsheet, you’re not going to think much of the potential of a GUI, right? The GUI at the time, at best which just recreate it and maybe it looks a little cooler but is fundamentally the same.
That’s the thing. All apps today are designed for GUI, which are limited by the boundaries of a screen, mouse or touch screen, be it one piece of glass or a foldable, rollable device. They are all fundamentally built for GUI. Which means GUI apps, of course, are going to be supported here just like Text UI apps like a spreadsheet was supported on Mac, but none of them are (yet) taking advantage of the new UI paradigm. That’s why a lot of apps, like Messages or Safari, look like a “2D window in 3D space,” albeit not exactly because they take advantage of the new paradigm more than that.
So when you ask, “what’s the point?” I tell you to look at this:
Reliving your memories of those you care about; the ability to see 3 dimensionally, so much more than a traditional picture that it’s been described as peering into someone’s life.
Not getting “the best seats in the house,” but getting the ONLY seats in the house; the ability to see a play being shown elsewhere, a sporting event in another part of the country, or experiences like diving into the shallow water of a tropical island with unique animals, all from a perspective impossible for a group of people to share in real-life — all captured with 3D, 8K, HDR video that wraps around you.
Seeing and learning about things you could never normally have access to; the ability to see something you’re learning about, and be able to see inside of it and see, right in front of you, the real time interactions of subatomic molecules or what the inside of an animal is, and learn how all of these things work in ways a textbook or even an iPad can’t fully detail.
The possibilities of a fully 3 dimensional interface have barely begun, and I hope I’ve demonstrated a bit about how the possibilities are vast. This is more than playing a game on a floating screen in front of you, it is about revolutionizing how the whole world works, all over again.
The era of spatial computing is here.
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